Thoughts on Gates Security Memo

While reading Gary McGraw's great book Software Security, I had a chance to re-read the famous Bill Gates security memo of January 2002. I wasn't blogging back then, so I didn't record my reaction to it. Almost five years later, the following excerpt struck me:

[E]ven more important than any of these new capabilities is the fact that it is designed from the ground up to deliver Trustworthy Computing. What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on these systems to be available and to secure their information. Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony.

Today, in the developed world, we do not worry about electricity and water services being available. With telephony, we rely both on its availability and its security for conducting highly confidential business transactions without worrying that information about who we call or what we say will be compromised. Computing falls well short of this, ranging from the individual user who isn't willing to add a new application because it might destabilize their system, to a corporation that moves slowly to embrace e-business because today's platforms don't make the grade. (emphasis added)

Hold the phone (no pun intended). "[A]vailable, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony"? You mean the solid electricity system that blacked out the northeast US in 2003? Or the two water pipes running into New York City that could be disrupted or poisoned? Or the telephone system owned by the Phone Masters in the late 1990s or spied upon by three letter agenices in this decade?

I propose that the main reason that electricity, water, and telephony are (wrongly) considered "secure" is the fewer number of threats facing them. Networked digital resources are exposed to far greater numbers of threats than analog resources like electrical power plants, water treatment facilities, and telephone closets. This is changing as all of these analog resources are being controlled by IP-enabled systems with global reachability.

This makes me wonder if digital security is being held to a higher, possibly impossible, standard. Is there any other system in the world that could be accessed by any threat, at any time? This is not a wise-guy question -- I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. What sorts of man-made systems are relentlessly under attack by intelligent adversaries? I'm adding intelligence here to remove comparisons to diseases, weather, earthquakes, and so on.

The first system that came to mind was the modern casino. People are always trying to cheat, so the threat level is high. A variety of financial systems come to mind, although I'm trying to avoid systems with close ties to digital functionality. Physical security probably has a few useful lessons.

What do you think?